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Wednesday, February 01, 2012
you and me and Smelly makes three
Title: Very Hard Choices
Author: Spider Robinson
Bookmark: that business card, again. It was handy.
A few months ago, I started an office library. People could bring in books they owned, add a Post-it with their name, and drop them on a shelf for anyone to access. Knowing how some people treat books (curling the covers of paperbacks, dribbling food in them, smashing bugs between pages--I even know someone who used to read in the shower. Appalling.), I was hesitant to involve books which were important to me, but I sent a cautionary email about handling other people's stuff, and the project has gone pretty well. It gets less use now that someone has claimed that room as an office and moved all the books to a bottom shelf, hidden behind his desk, but I still managed to find a book with the coolest author name ever. I would have read it just for that. As it turns out, there's plenty of reason to read a Spider Robinson book.
Sure, his politics are all through it, but there are great lines (even paragraphs) comparing the US and Canada, and sentences which simultaneously mock and laud our neighbors to the north. The book can be both hilarious and terrifying, and despite the fact that it's a sequel, I had convinced myself while reading that it only seemed that way. The story is so complete on its own that it doesn't need something else to lead into it, although I admit that I spent most of my time wishing I knew the story to which they kept alluding, because it seemed even more wrenching than Very Hard Choices.
Russel Walker, a reclusive national columnist, was college roommates with Zandor "Smelly" Zudenigo. Smelly never bathed, and is described as looking like the Michelin Man with a childlike version of Winston Churchill's head. Oh, and he's a telepath. But Walker doesn't learn that until the previous book, when Smelly comes to him for help after discovering that a very bad man is planning to do very horrible things to a completely innocent family. They enlist the help of police constable Nika Mandic to stop the bad guy.
This book covers what happens next, after the bad guy is no longer a problem, but a new bad guy appears on the scene, and he wants Smelly (usually referred to as "Zudie" in this book, because his island hermitage, far away from the noise of other minds, allows him to have a more conventional hygiene schedule, as he had previously used the stench to keep people away while protecting his secret mental powers). Russel, Nika, and Russel's son Jesse must deal with the mysterious agent tracking them across the island of Heron Rock, contact the elusive Zudie, and figure out what to do to protect themselves and each other. The whole book (except for a couple obligatory flashbacks) takes place over one night. It's excellent, even if the ending is a bit pat.Labels: action, decomposing bodies, espionage, secrets, special abilities
posted by reyn at
10:59 AM
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tinker, Biker, Beggerman, Nerd
Title: The Urban Biking Handbook
Author: Charles Haine
Bookmark: a business card with a ludicrously long title
For Christmas, I asked for a book on building (and repairing) one's own bicycle. I had been inspired by an event I attended in November (the Oregon Handmade Bicycle Show), and an article from a magazine I picked up at said event. Beautiful bikes, custom-built to be a perfect fit for both the size and riding preferences of their owners. Pricy, of course, because they involve someone making a frame to fit your frame, but I figured it could be a good project for me; I love biking, and I feel that a mechanical engineer who doesn't know the second thing about his car's engine should at least be able to take care of his own bike, or stop calling himself an engineer.
The book is specifically targeted at people who do the majority of their biking in cities. So far, that isn't me, but while that is the book's promise, the scope is a bit broader than the cover might imply. It even has good information no matter how much biking experience you have. Some of the chapters (what to wear while biking) and How-Tos (jumping a curb or fixing a flat) are stuff I've known since my early teens, but others (the wide variety of, and subtle differences between frame types; how to grease and re-pack bearings) were fascinating new stuff for me.
Haine would benefit from a good proof-reader--there were some weird typos, and a couple instances when the large intro to a chapter, printed bold in the margin, was just a paragraph of text from that chapter (including one instance where it was the entirety of the chapter)--and I was disappointed both that the very brief section on the cases for and against helmets had ANY case against helmets. For that matter, it also bothered me that many of the pictures which showed bikers wearing helmets (there were at least as many without) showed helmets that were improperly adjusted. Hopefully, anyone looking to get into biking would consult more than one book, but as someone who's been bounced off one or two cars who weren't paying attention to me OR road laws, WEAR YOUR DAMN HELMET! And take a look at the book--good information, lots of pictures.Labels: how-to, self-help, Washington DC
posted by reyn at
11:50 AM
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Thursday, January 05, 2012
Marathon Moron
Title: Marathon Training for Dummies
Author: Tere Stouffer Drenth
Bookmark: a four-year-old note to myself.
Shortly after I announced to family that I was going to run my first half-marathon, I got this book for Christmas. It has since spent a few years largely unregarded. This past fall, I started training for my third half-marathon (I did not get my fastest half-marathon time, but I am most proud of this particular race, if only for the respectable time on a grueling course) and picked up the book in earnest.
Originally, I had joked that I'd only read half of it because I'm only a half-marathoner (by the same logic, I tell people that I only run half-marathons because I'm only half in shape), but of course that wasn't the case. The book is focused on marathon training, but it covers lots of good habits for running, even if I disagree with some of the information in the nutrition chapter. The section on running injuries also gave me an exciting and painful way to avoid shin splints, which are usually the reason I stop running for months at a time. So far, so good.
The book was published in 2003, so some of the information may already be out of date, but it was still a good resource for me, and allowed me to have slightly more solid footing when arguing with my own running expert. More importantly, it made me feel a little better, if not wholly confident, in my own running ability (especially when the book would mention a marathon goal time I found absurdly long, allowing me to think "even I could do that!!"). My first marathon is still somewhere in my indeterminate future, but it's nice to have this resource at hand, even if I didn't really finish reading it until last night, three months after my race. (don't judge me--once I crossed the finish line, the book became a little inconsequential to my race)Labels: how-to, sports
posted by reyn at
4:24 PM
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Tuesday, December 06, 2011
bones to pick
Title: City of Bones
Author: Michael Connelly
Bookmark: a bookmark
Many years ago I read The Concrete Blonde (so long ago that it predated this blog), and was reminded of it recently when I saw someone reading it on a Kindle during a flight. I saw enough to recognize the story, but I had no memory of how it ended. Connelly's good like that. Even if a step or two in the investigation is predictable, there are enough weird turns to make the ending feel clever.
City of Bones opens with Connelly's usual hero Harry Bosch fielding calls on New Year's Day. After two suicides, he gets called into one of the canyons of LA where a doctor's dog has retrieved a bone from the woods, which the good doctor assures Harry is from a child.
As Harry and his partner Jerry Edgar investigate a case which hits home for both of them (Edgar has a son; Harry was a foster kid after his mom died), Harry gets close to the rookie beat cop who was on scene at the doctor's the first night, and the deputy chief takes every opportunity to try to force Harry out of his department.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
I just wish there were more depth in the death of one of the main characters. When it happens, it seems abrupt and perfunctory, and we never get a clear explanation of what happened. Character traits explained by Bosch to the department shrink at the funeral feel like they were introduced at that very moment; there really isn't much sign of any of it before he mentions them. It feels like Connelly ran out of ideas for her and killed her off so she wouldn't be his problem anymore, which is unfortunate for other characters and the reader.Labels: murder, mystery/detective
posted by reyn at
4:01 PM
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the butler, but only once
Title: Whodunits: More Than 100 Mysteries For You To Solve
Author(s): Tom Bullimore, Hy Conrad, Derrick Niederman, Stan Smith
Bookmark: a picture of a deer attacking a police cruiser
The book is split into four sections; it seems like each author did his own thing, because there are pretty obvious stylistic differences between them. I don't think they all got the same memo describing the collaborative project.
There are big differences in what each of them thinks constitutes a "mystery." The first does a solid job of laying out a short story, giving you just enough information to solve it, and explaining the answers well (all solutions are in a separate section in the back of the book). The second also does well, but the stories are more like elaborate logic puzzles, or simple logic puzzles dressed in a new story (lots of variations on "X always tells truth, Y always lies, Z just likes to set fires" kind of puzzles). The third apparently set up the stories on a website and invited people to ask questions to help them solve the mysteries. The questions asked and answered are not always very relevant, and certainly not what a real investigator would need to know. One particularly annoyed me because the solution hinged on obscure sports trivia and the date of the "crime," which was never mentioned until the solution. The final section was a long parade of simple (in execution and presentation, though not always in solution) logic puzzles. Several times I encountered one which I didn't think included enough information for pure logic to derive the answer, and at least once it was just flat-out wrong. Most annoying was that the solutions offered no explanation whatsoever, so that if you weren't clear on how to find the answer, you would always stay that way.
For the most part, it was still a lot of fun. The first two sections were great, and I think the third offered a neat concept, but the execution was a little bit flawed. If they ever make Volume II, they will hopefully have the wisdom to not call the fourth guy.Labels: fun, mystery/detective
posted by reyn at
3:40 PM
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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Swedish Mess
Title: The Man From Beijing
Author: Henning Mankell
bookmark: a normal bookmark
This is the guy who wrote the Wallander novels (which I only know about because I saw trailers for the TV show when I watched the Sherlock series). Intro portion concluded.
Picture a lovely tiny forest village in Sweden. Very tiny. About a dozen homes, and through marriage, most of the residents are relatives. Nice, if a bit creepy, right? Oh, one more thing: one night in February, somebody with a big damn knife (or maybe a sword) slaughters almost everyone in the village. Even the dogs, cats, and a parrot (who was decapitated). The police find out about it when a photographer fleeing in terror has a coronary and drives into an oncoming truck. His dying word is the name of the village.
Judge Birgitta Roslin finds out about it in the papers a few days later, recognizes the name of the village, and discovers her mother's foster parents were among the victims. Then, like any good fictional character, she launches her own investigation. Unlike every other fictional character investigating outside normal police channels, the cops blow her off.
Roslin keeps digging, pursuing a completely different line of inquiry from the police, and travels to Beijing and London before she has all the answers. Sounds great, right? Except... I still haven't decided whether I like the book. I can't really say it wasn't compelling, because I've started other books, gotten bored with them, and set them aside permanently. I kept reading this one. I'm just not sure there was a good reason for it. I liked that there was an unlikely protagonist, a sort of late-middle-age Miss Marple without as many unlikely gimmicks (I never bought how Marple could easily imitate anyone's voice, nor how she used that trick to get people to confess to the murder of the voice's real owner), but I never really cared about her. At one point, she realizes that someone has given her suspect her home address and thinks the man an old fool, but she spends a great deal of time in the book making really stupid choices and trusting people she's only just met with far too much. The final resolution feels forced, and there's a lot of discussion about China, its politics, economy, and leadership which would be fascinating if I had any idea what opinion the author actually has--it's never clear how we're supposed to feel about things.
Originally, I thought I might wrap up this book, recommended and loaned to me by a co-worker's wife, then try some Wallander, because as anyone can tell, I love a good mystery. After reading it and letting it marinate in my brain a couple days... I think I prefer to dig up some old Hammett or Chandler.Labels: Africa, China, murder, mystery/detective, vengeance
posted by reyn at
4:07 PM
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Friday, October 07, 2011
Brief? Yes. Interminable? Also Yes.
Title: A Brief History of Time
Author: Stephen Hawking
There are a number of different varieties of quarks: there are six “flavors,” which we call up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. … Each flavor comes in three “colors,” red, green, and blue. … A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, one of each color. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark; a neutron contains two down and one up. We can create particles made up of the other quarks (strange, charmed, bottom, top), but these all have a much greater mass and decay very rapidly into protons and neutrons.
In brief: disappointing.
Even for those not mathematically inclined, the possibilities presented by cutting-edge theoretical physics can be fascinating. Scientific theory tells us that black holes can stretch time and worm holes enable FTL travel. Scientific observation tells us how our sun breathes and how stars die. I love reading about stuff like that and imagining all the amazing stories waiting for us in the universe. Personally, I rather believe that little green men probably are (or were, or will be) out there, because the universe is a big place, and there’s probably a corner of it somewhere for little green men. And another corner elsewhere for pink elephants on roller blades.
But reading Stephen Hawking can sure take the fun out of all this speculation.
I’ve enjoyed a few popular books on astronomy/physics, but A Brief History of Time was a real chore for me to slog through. Hawking may very well be a brilliant theorist, but his writing style leaves much to be desired. I found his words neither informative nor entertaining, just rather dry and droning. The above paragraph is a good example. Hawking presents the reader with this absolutely fascinating nugget of information that there are things called charmed quarks out there. Wow, cool! So, what makes a quark charmed? I have no idea. Not one. Hawking never explains. I found this incredibly frustrating.
I was able to glean a few nuggets of understanding from A Brief History, but mostly about things I already knew (or had known once and forgotten). His explanation of red shift is fairly decent, and he does do justice to the basics of black holes. But when he then launched into more advanced theory (how black holes emit radiation, for instance) … well, I simply fell off that FTL rocket ship and could not keep up.
Admittedly, I may just be dim. At the very least, I know I learn far better through stories than through mathematics or memorization. (I think Brian Greene’s “Icarus at the Edge of Time” is simply brilliant.) But I thought A Brief History was supposed to be written for people like me: dim, perhaps, but eager to learn nonetheless.
Despite my dissatisfaction with it, I’d still recommend A Brief History. It's shiny gold cover will look good sitting on your coffee table, and you’ll be able to impress others by casually mentioning that you read it. (Although perhaps you’d be able to impress them even more by saying you found it to be trite and uninspiring!) But if you really want to understand topics such as relativity, blacks holes, and quantum mechanics, you’d be far better off with something like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. It may not be brief, but it sure goes down easier.Labels: black holes, nonfiction, science
posted by Elizabeth at
8:58 PM
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Wednesday, October 05, 2011
The [proper noun] [impressive-sounding noun(s)]
Title: The Gemini Contenders
Author: Robert Ludlum
Bookmark: a bookmark
Having read a lot of Ludlum's later stuff, I think I can safely say that if I had started with his earlier stuff, I wouldn't have bothered reading more. Or maybe, like my friend Spider's disappointment upon rediscovering Knight Rider, it's more that what I loved when I was much younger just isn't that good when viewed with an older eye.
Gemini Contenders seems to be about an Italian industrial magnate, Ludlum's most unlikely hero ever. His father helped a secretive sect of Greek monks to hide a vault somewhere in the mountains. We come to find out that the vault contains ancient scrolls and parchments that are some sort of Big Damn Deal which could shake apart modern religions and set countries against each other. Years later, in the dawn of the Second World War, Junior arrives to a family gathering late, but just in time to witness everyone get slaughtered by Nazi troops.
Then the Brits give him some military and tactical training so he can mess with the German war machine by covertly mismanaging every factory they control, and there's some weird subplot with orchestrating his marriage to control him somehow, but that's never adequately explained. the whole time he's trying to do his job and mess up the Nazi scourge, there are other parties, all convinced that he knows the location of the vault, trying to get the information from him. Oh, and he gets tortured almost to death once or twice.
The Geminis mentioned in the title? They don't even show up until the books about two-thirds over. And they don't contend over anything for several chapters. Junior has twin sons that end up both going after the vault for very different reasons.
The whole thing is preposterous, convoluted, and way the hell over-the-top. Even for Ludlum.Labels: conspiracy, crazy fiction, historical fiction, religion, war
posted by reyn at
1:43 PM
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